We’ve now officially joined our European friends in deep summer, with an oppressive heat dome settling over the central and eastern US ahead of the July 4 weekend:
My extended family’s July 4 cookout is starting to look more like it’ll be a cook-in, pool or no pool. I think I’ll sit inside and watch baseball, thank you very much!
On behalf of Bud and myself, I hope everyone is taking it easy and staying indoors as much as possible.
For our friends in the New York area, you already know what the deal is: sticky, soupy heat from the high humidity that is the trademark of our summers.
Of course our furry friends have it even worse in this weather. Imagine having a jacket you cannot remove in humid 100 degree heat! Even Bud, a domestic shorthair, has modified his sleeping habits, snoozing next to my head with a paw on my hand instead of draping himself over me like he usually does.
Here’s to hoping everyone stays safe, hydrated and lazy this holiday weekend!
With much of the US already sweltering under a summer heat dome, architectural engineers warn most American buildings aren’t designed for extreme temperatures, while energy experts warn of more rolling blackouts.
A family in Mission Viejo, Calif., heard a series of loud crashes at their back door, then reviewed their doorbell camera footage to find a determined coyote had been trying to attack their cat.
The footage shows the coyote repeatedly throwing itself at the screen door, which might have buckled if there hadn’t been a baby gate reinforcing it.
“We ended up putting a baby gate up to keep the cats inside,” homeowner Cindy Stalnaker told KABC. “That ended up being what prevented the coyote from getting inside the house because that’s what he was banging into repeatedly.”
Coyotes weigh about 30 to 35 pounds and will attack potential prey smaller than they are, which includes pets as well as young children.
The canids aren’t usually keen on approaching human homes, but in many places they’ve run out of room to roam as towns and cities clear more wild land for new developments. Less habitat means less prey, which can also lead the animals to scavenge and hunt on the fringes of residential and urban neighborhoods.
Stalnaker said she was grateful the baby gate held, but she’s looking into a more stable and permanent solution to keep her cats safe from coyotes.
What if air conditioning isn’t enough?
Human activity isn’t just driving wild animals to extinction, it’s killing them off with temperature extremes, and a Tuesday story from The Guardian provides a bleak look at how our present situation threatens human life as well: Buildings in most US cities aren’t built to mitigate excess heat, air conditioners weren’t designed to keep on chugging indefinitely with temperatures around 100 degrees, and power grids can’t keep up with the demand when millions of AC units are drawing power simultaneously.
At the same time, summers keep getting hotter and there’s no reprieve in sight.
Legal or not, New Yorkers turn to fire hydrants to get relief during heat waves. Credit: NYC Office of Emergency Management
While the heat has major ramifications for animals and sea life, it’s also directly endangering human life now:
“Some experts have begun to warn of the looming threat of a “Heat Katrina” – a mass-casualty heat event. A study published last year that modeled heatwave-related blackouts in different cities showed that a two-day blackout in Phoenix could lead to the deaths of more than 12,000 people.”
An architectural engineer tells the newspaper that temperatures have spiked so much in recent summers that cooling “systems that we sold 10 years ago are not able to keep up with the weather we have.”
The result for people in America’s hottest cities is that even AC doesn’t provide relief.
In the meantime we’re likely to see more headlines about rolling blackouts, punishing energy bills and people dying in their homes, scientists say. Fusion power and significant leaps in battery technology can’t come soon enough.
Pain In The Bud 